Designing, Painting and Modeling a HIVE Coin in 3D

Image Source: Background Adobe Stock, screenshots from applications and icons. Illustrator, Painter and Stager icons are Copyright Adobe. Blender icon is a registered trademark of the Blender Foundation in EU and USA. Logos used under fair use provisions for the purpose of review.

As you may have seen from my previous post creating stock images for the hive community using physical bitcoins, I enjoy the process of staging and lighting a scene. I was disappointed to find out that no one as yet has had the resources to create a physical $HIVE or $HBD coin.

3D has been an interest of mine since University, and for a few years, I worked as a developer for a company that, amongst other things, built virtual reality applications. So I have had some exposure to the 3D modelling space and done some own learning in my spare time.

I decided to try and create a realistic-looking coin to use as a prop for stock photography; my original idea was to get the coin produced in metal. However, as it turns out, this is difficult and expensive. As one Hive user pointed out:

I hope you have deep pockets.

As part of the process, I decided to update my toolchain and try and use Adobe's suite of creative tools, and this only went partially to plan. I want to thank members of the Silver Gold Stackers community and @thekittygirl for pointing me in their direction - they helped me to understand some of the complexity in what I wanted to do.

Designing the Coin Face (Adobe Illustrator)

I firmly believe in the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid), so I started with the Hive logo (available under the MIT licence) in Adobe Illustrator and embellished it with some decals to fill some of the space within the circle. Finally, I added some of the key phrases from the Hive Whitepaper that describe at a headline how Hive is designed.

Modelling the Coin (Blender)

My original plan was to use Substance Modeler to create the 3D model by extruding a stamp from the SVG and then subtracting that from a cylinder. However, as it turns out, that's not possible in Adobe's tool as it is pretty new and needs to be better integrated into the ecosystem.

Instead, I reverted to using Blender to create the image; ultimately, I found it easier to extrude the SVG above and below a squat cylinder and tidy up the vertices with Blender's extensive tools.

Finally, I added some smoothing to the objects to make the object look round.

Painting the Coin (Substance Painter)

Texturing the coin is possible in Blender; However, I found it easier to deal with the more straightforward user interface in Substance Painter; I'd used it a little before it was acquired by Adobe. Blender contains so many options for shaders and materials that it is often difficult to find the best texture.

Essentially this was a drag-drop process of searching for the Gold material and dragging it onto the model. At this stage, I had something that looked good, although it looked a little flat as a floating coin in the middle of a void.

The finished coin is available on Sketch Fab under the CC-BY-SA licence.

Staging the Coin (Substance Stager)

Again this would have been possible in Blender; however, stager benefits from simplified tools and a catalogue of free assets to get you started. Most of the assets help create reflections and shadows, which makes the coin look more realistic.

The net result is a series of images rendered using ray tracing on my GeForce 3080.

All images below are licenced under a permissive license; feel free to use them in your posts. If you have ideas for other scenes, do let me know and I will take a shot at rendering them.

Feel free to download the models and play about with them, Blender is Free and Open Source and Adobe have a free 30-day trial of all of their products.